Physical Education

At Slade, we want to ensure that our children receive high quality Physical Education lessons that provide them with a wealth of opportunities to develop their physical skills in a range of different disciplines and lessons that go beyond the classroom to develop the whole child. We use the GetSet4PE platform to underpin our PE lessons, which ensures that lessons carefully consider the National Curriculum, are progressive from Nursery through to year 6 and ensure the holistic development of all children.

Our PE lessons: 

At Slade, we teach at least 2 hours of Physical Education per week. In each lesson, our teachers use Knowledge Organisers, supporting resources and skills videos to ensure that the very best standards of Physical Education are modelled to our children. Each lesson involves meeting sport-specific learning objectives and whole-child learning objectives through a series of planned activities: a warm up that prepares the children for exercise, teaches them about the purpose of a warm up and introduces them to the content taught during that lesson; a skill development session, where children are explicitly taught a new skill, are given success criteria to improve the skill being taught and are given additional adaptations to make the skill practice more/less difficult; explicit teaching of the rules within that discipline to ensure they participate safely and within the appropriate constraints; an opportunity to practice the taught skill in a game-related or different way that is adapted to suit their level of development; a plenary that reinforces the knowledge taught and assesses our children’s understanding to inform the next lesson. 

Each lesson is differentiated to create suitable challenge for all pupils. One way that lessons are differentiated is through the STEP principle: 

• Space– adapting the distance, height, playing surface or size of an activity.
• Task– changing the rules, children’s roles within the activity, the conditions an activity must be completed in or progressing the task in terms of complexity. 
• Equipment– modifying the equipment to make the activity less/more challenging for each child. 
• People– adapting the groupings or participants to offer less/more challenge. 

As with all of the subjects in our curriculum, we incorporate the explicit teaching of vocabulary into our PE curriculum. For each sport/discipline, we have Vocabulary Pyramids that detail a progression of new words to teach the children during each year of their Physical Education. These words are taught and explored to grow the words that our children know exponentially, which supports them in other areas of the curriculum and later life. We are also aware that, to build our children’s love of reading, we must offer a wide range of reading opportunities and this includes reading about sports and sporting heroes too! Children have access to a wide range of books, including books to learn new sporting skills and techniques, books about their favourite sport and the professionals who play them, fictional stories about the sports they love and even biographies about their sporting heroes! We are constantly looking to update the books we have so if there is a sporting book your child would like to read, let us know! We also ensure that there are opportunities within our PE curriculum for our children to be ambitious and develop a growth mindset. At each stage of their Physical Education, children are encouraged to embrace a challenge and thrive “in the learning pit”, meaning that they actively seek out activities that they find challenging because they know that this is where they learn the most! We focus on not being able to achieve something “yet”, rather than just not being able to achieve something and ensuring that our children persevere when faced with a challenge.